Countertop Ice Maker: Ice in 8 Minutes?

Welcome back, everybody. Today I'm back with the countertop ice maker. I've been wanting to do these for a long time

I'm finally getting around to it. There's a lot of models out there like this one, but I picked the brand name with a bunch of reviews

It seems pretty popular, so let's see how it works in today's video. Let's first take a closer look of this now. I paid $104.76 for this

There's a bunch of similar models of this one online, but I picked this one out because it's a brand name

And it has a solid 4.5 star rain among over 5,000 reviews. The claims that they can make up to 26 pounds of ice per day and can start making ice

in as little as six minutes. It produces nine cues about every seven to 15 minutes

It can store up to 1.5 pounds of ice inside and the reservoir holds 2.3 quarts of water

Now on Amazon most people like it, a lot of it produces a lot of ice. They're very happy with that

A few complaints. Some people said it was too slow. Some people said it didn't hold a lot of ice. Some people were complaining that it wasn't refrigerated. And to be clear, this is not a refrigerated model when it produces ice

If you don't take it out of there, it's going to start melting. If it does melt, it goes back in the reservoir and just gets reused again. There are models out there that do have refrigerated

refrigeration but they're typically in different price range so I want to stick with one the more popular models of this type. There really isn't a lot to this but here's the features

On the top you've got a control panel with add water ice full power and smaller large ice cubes

Inside you've got the ice scoop and a basket. Take those out you've got the water reservoir

with the max fill line and then back there is where all the magic happens. Not really a lot to it

But let's fire this up and see what we got now. Follow the instructions here. Step one is ensure the drain plugs in place it is. Plug the ice makes

maker in Ice makers plugged in They see that going to be a green light that flashes every five seconds And the green light is flashing Next up open the cover remove the basket It already removed Fill the reservoir and don use distilled water

All right now I've got the water in there right to the max fill line. Replace the ice basket. Close the cover

I'm going to press the on off button and I'm going to leave it on large cubes

I hear something going on inside. Let's take a peek. Remove this basket and see what it's doing in there

Well, we have basically a little waterfall going on. That's kind of nice

I guess if it doesn't work as an ice cube maker you can use as a white noise machine. All right, a fan just kicked on and I'm starting my stopwatch right now

So they say it's going to take 8 to 13 minutes for the first batch of ice cubes and I think

according to the comments the first batch is usually kind of smaller than the rest of them. So I'm going to wait here for the first batch and let you know if anything changes

At the 8.5 minute mark the fan just went off so I think something's happening. Let's check it out. Oh yeah

We have the first batch. Just over eight minutes. There goes. There we go

Let's take a look at this ice. Here's the first batch. It doesn't look too bad. Apparently, people were saying the first batch is a little bit thinner than the rest of them

so we'll take a look at how this compares to the rest. By the time the next batch is done, these might be mostly melted

So it's kind of, it's always fighting against that. So we're at eight and a half minutes for the first batch. Let's see how the second one goes and how much this ice is melted by the time that's done

I want this basket to be full before I emptied it. Let's see how long that takes to fill up this basket completely

But I'll check back where the next batch is done and we'll see how the next batch is done and we'll see how that went

The second batch should be about almost done, but I was going to point out the volume. It's not really that loud. It's about as loud as my food dehydrator is

I've heard some ice makers are pretty loud. This one doesn't seem very loud to me. But we at the 16 minute mark so I guessing the next batch is almost done Let check it out So as we wait for the second batch it looks like the first one is about half melted already Is it going to drop Oh they dropping They dropped They dropped It pretty cool actually

Now it's just going to shove them into the basket. All right there we go. Let's check these out

These do seem a little bit bigger than the first batch and you can see the one from the first batch is already about half as big as it's starting to melt

We'll see how long this takes to fill this basket up. All right so I'm not going to open this again. I'm going to leave the stopwatch running and we're going to see how long

long it takes to fill this basket up from when I first started. So I'll come back later

When it's completely full, we'll see how long it took. At an hour and 28 minutes, I'm getting the

ice full notification. So let's see how much ice it actually made in an hour and a half

Moving the basket. Seems like a pretty good amount. This is how much you got in an hour and a half

I got this bowl on the scale here. Let's see what we got. So right about one pound of ice in an

hour and a half. They say about 26 pounds a day. So if you extrapolate that, it's not quite 26

but it's pretty close. It's see how much water used. It looks like we got to use about half the water in there

I'm going to let it keep going before I refill the water. I'm going to put this ice in maybe a

Ziplog bag or something put in the freezer. Batch number two I'm going to go with a small ice

cubes. We'll see how long that whole process takes. I'll compare them to large cubes and see how it goes

Stop watching this going. I'll let you know anything changes. At just about the one hour mark I got an update for you

It says the ice full light is on but we're also almost out of water too so let me take this out of here

What's interesting is that the small cubes don't look much different than the big cubes

Big cube on the left small cube on the right Is there much difference If there is it not very much But this is what we got Putting my cubes in a Ziploc bag I gonna put in the freezer and just keep going Stop watching this going again I gonna keep going

I'm gonna see how many batches I can make today. It looks like right now it's gonna be between an hour and a half per batch

and each one of those batches is one pound. So I'm gonna make a few more batches

so I can kind of figure out of exactly how it really takes. Got my stopwatch going, I'll let you know when the next batch is made

So I did six batches in about seven hours and I got about six pounds of ice out of that

which seems pretty good to me. I did three, of large cubes and the three sets of small cubes. For the large, I came in with 88 minutes

73 minutes and 57 minutes. Although that first one seemed like a little bit unusually long

maybe it was a temperature of the water or the first time use, I'm not really sure. For the small cubes it came in at 59 minutes, 58 minutes, and 63 minutes. Basically it's going

take about an hour to fill up the ice basket. Each individual batch takes about eight

minutes, although I didn't really see a big difference between the small and large cubes and the small ones are a little bit faster, so I'd probably just go with that

So let's take a look at the pros and cons. Now the pros would be that's very simple to use, and it's pretty consistent and it makes a pretty good amount of ice

The only problem, depending on how you use it, is that you're going to have to keep checking on every hour

If you have it sitting out at a party, for example, that's probably not a problem, but if you're trying to make a lot of ice

you're going to have to keep checking on every single hour. I kind of wish there was an alarm. You could toggle on and off to let you know when the tray is full

but it doesn't seem to have that feature. As it is right now, you kind of have to keep checking on it

It's not refrigerated, so if you don't take it out right away, it's going to melt back in the reservoir

There are refrigerated ice makers out there, but they're in a different price range. I want to stick with this particular type

which is about 100 bucks. If you're a channel member, I've got a short video telling you about the last time I tried to do an ice maker review

and another reason why I don't take sponsored post. But if you've tried an ice maker like this

telling me what you think in the comments below. I appreciate you watching and I'll see you next time